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Okay, so I know that Tuesday night is approximately the least opportune time to tell you all about pumpkin pancakes.  For the great majority of us, pancakes are a strictly weekend endeavor.  And I get that.  I think of pancakes as the breakfast-time counterpart to dinner-time’s risotto: they require you to stand at the stove for a stretch of time, repeating the same motions over and over and over (pancakes: ladle the batter onto a sizzling-hot griddle, cook, flip, repeat; risotto: ladle the broth into a hot pan of arborio, cook, stir, repeat).  And you can taste all that attention, all that love, all that patience when you sit down at the breakfast table to eat the pancakes (or, dinner table, in the case of risotto).  But, maple-syrup-ed taste-of-love notwithstanding, pancakes simply do not factor into my Monday through Friday.  They have no place in the pre-work rush.

Instead, they are best saved for a lazy weekend morning, when the smell of strong, freshly-brewed coffee hangs in the air, when the air is still and quiet and the light is filtered, when the promise of the day—a weekend day—stretches out before you, long and luxurious.  That’s the time to fire up the griddle.  And, sitting here on Tuesday, I realize that we’re nowhere near Saturday morning.  (Do I ever.)

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Kevin lodged a vague request for something banana-y and breakfast-y a couple weeks back.  Normally, I am thrilled to have a request and act on it as quickly as possible, but such jump-to-it-ness simply isn’t possible when it comes to banana -based baked goods.  Unless, of course, you store bananas in your freezer, an excellent practice and one that I am not organized enough to accomplish.  So, I did the next best thing: I snapped up a bunch of bananas at the store.  And then I waited.

When purchased, the bananas’ peels were a sunny hue, blemish-free and even tinged with whispers of lime green.  In short, these bananas were completely unsuitable for baking.  It wasn’t until a week later, when the bananas had softened on the kitchen counter, taking on a deeply freckled complexion, that they were ready.  By that time, of course, I wasn’t in the mood to bake my regular old banana bread.

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Oof.

Now that was a week.  Or two weeks?!  No, it can’t be!  But, I guess it has been.  After posting on July 15, the midpoint of the month, the balance of July proceeded to swallow me whole.  There was a lot of time at the office and then waning hours of daylight spent soaking up the warm, un-air conditioned air.  There was a trip to Cleveland for work, which involved a mediocre hotel and less-than-mediocre food.  But then, oh then, there was a trip to the mountains, to Park City in particular, for some dear friends’ wedding.

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It’s been a heck of a summer.  At last count, I’ve spent it in no fewer than six states: Minnesota (thrice), Michigan, Wisconsin, Colorado and California.  Illinois, too, of course, though it seems like that state—my home state—fits squarely at the end of the list.  To be honest, all the traveling has left me feeling a little frayed around the edges.  The individual little trips have combined to give me a sometimes-overwhelming feeling that’s part jet lag, part homesickness and part exhaustion.

But never, not once, did I go hungry.  These travels all came with the happy byproduct of wonderful meals and time spent cooking atop other people’s stoves; sitting around other people’s dining tables; washing, drying and returning the dishes to other people’s cupboards.  These things eased the pangs of longing for my own kitchen, my regret at missing week after week of my farmers’ market.

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While we were in Northern Minnesota, my grandpa made us all a big platter of pancakes for breakfast one morning.  As he sat on his kitchen stool flipping the hot cakes, one by one, my grandma told us the story behind the recipe: Pancakes by Norma.  My grandparents used to drive the hour south to Duluth every so often to spend the night “in town.”  They’d stay with my grandpa’s brother and, in what became a tradition, his wife Norma would serve them her pancakes—the very pancakes my grandpa was frying up that morning.

On one trip to Duluth, my grandma jotted down the recipe and, when she got back to her own kitchen, scrawled it into the margins of one of her most well-used cookbooks for safekeeping.  Now, my grandma’s handwriting has a tendency toward illegibility—at least for the uninitiated.  But I’ve read countless pieces of mail from her—sometimes featuring her golf game, other times providing a garden update, always recounting the weather—and I’ve learned to decipher her hand.  Here’s the recipe in her cookbook (but, don’t worry; given your lack of practice, I’ve translated it for you below):

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On Sunday afternoon, I visited a little corner of hell.  It wasn’t subterranean, it wasn’t all that hot, but hell it was, right there in Lincoln Park, at the corner of Kingsbury and Sheffield.  Chicagoans might recognize this location: it’s the site of Chicago’s brand new, super(-duper)-sized Whole Foods—a sprawling spectacle of food and booze and carts and people.

To be fair, I’m kind of a sucker for spectacles and I actually quite this new Whole Foods.  But I apparently only like it before the hour of 9 a.m., or some similarly unpopulated hour.   I can tell you one thing for sure: I do not like it at the hour of 3 p.m. on a Sunday.

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This summer, I seem to be just a step behind when it comes to the coming’s and going’s of seasonal produce.  I’m still craving asparagus, for instance, even though the bundles of spears danced out of season weeks ago.  And I’ve got some lovely rhubarb recipes that will have to remain dog-earred until next spring, when those sassy stalks reappear.  Recently, I posted a salad studded with freshly-shelled peas, just as early summer was sliding into mid-summer, pushing peas out the door.  [For the record, though, peas were back at the Wicker Park Farmers' Market this weekend!]  I’m afraid that my timing is off again here, with today’s recipe—a quick bread dotted with tart cherries.

Tart cherries (any cherries, for that matter) were nowhere to be seen as I walked through the market on Sunday morning, with Kevin and my mom (!).  They slip in and out of season in a flash, which is not a bad plan, on their part—as it just leaves us wanting more.  But maybe you’ve been smart enough to squirrel away a pint or two in your freezer.  Or, better yet, maybe the cherries are still gracing the markets where you live (for all I know, they could still be around here too, especially at the larger markets like Green City).  Or maybe you’ll be good enough to save this recipe for the next time cherry season rolls around.  Or, hey I know!, maybe you’ll think of just the fruit to stand in for the cherries.

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The end of a long holiday weekend, I find, inspires a renewed resolve in the diet realm.  Where I was slathering a brat with mustard and reaching for another frosty beer just a day or two ago, I am now yearning for leafy greens and sparkling water.  The Fourth of July, it seems, breeds an earnest in me.  For a couple of days, that is.

And this bread is just the post-holiday thing, ready to chase away any over-indulgences of the weekend past.  Chalk full of whole grains, super-powered flaxseed, and tangy yogurt, this bread is about as earnest as it gets.  Sure it’s got a sweetness, but it’s only a whisper.  The main ingredient of this bread is a vegetable, for pete’s sake!

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I usually consider a frittata to be an anything-goes affair.  An excuse to clean out your fridge, if you will.  You can use any cheese banging around your fridge door.  The produce that will be sliced and diced and ultimately become suspended in the baked eggs can change right along with the seasons, as can the herbs.  If you are lucky enough to have just made a batch of homemade ice cream, say, and you have a bunch of yolk-less eggs on hand, you can use those in the skillet in place of whole eggs.  And I usually feel free to throw in any salty pork product that suits my fancy.

This recipe, though, has changed all that.  It’s really meant to be made exactly as its written.  As someone who has accumulated a rather lengthy list of heavily adapted recipes, I don’t make this claim lightly.

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For a long time, I was under the impression that scones were a fancy sort of breakfast pastry—one that was fussy and time-consuming.  Actually, for a long time before that, I didn’t even know what a scone was.  In the pre-Starbucks days, scones were just not the sort of thing that populated the bakery cases I visited as a kid.  (That, or I was so blinded by the chocolate-glazed long john’s that I just didn’t have eyes for anything else.)

I’ve since grown to love scones—how they hover on the line of sweet treat, without ever fully crossing the threshold; how they manage to achieve that buttery, crumbly texture that demands a coffee chaser; how they’re always a little misshapen, no two looking exactly the same; how they’re a blank canvas, waiting to be spiced and spruced however the baker sees fit.

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